Here's the Problem:

https://mediamatters.org/embed/206855

This scene from the TV series Homeland was featured on Monday’s MSNBC news, as a commentary on the Paris attacks. Notice around the 1:35 mark, when the solutions are proffered: “200,000 ground troops indefinitely to protect an equal number of doctors and teachers,” OR “bomb Raqqa into a parking lot.”

Those are the only options available to the mind of popular media (which is a mirror of popular thought). I fear that Western leadership suffers from the same tunnel-vision, when the question should be asked, “Why are we so impotent?”

We, the West, are powerless to fight against the ideology of Islam, as the clip correctly shows. But the problem is not one of strategy, but one of moral nerve. This moral nerve cannot be mustered, because the West has committed spiritual suicide, having finally and completely rejected its spiritual foundations in Christendom.

Christendom gets a lot of bad press right now, often without describing what it really was, could be, and really entails. Mention it and you will get one of two comments: “You can’t go back to the days of ‘Leave it to Beaver,'” or, “Yes, but the Crusades were terrible.” The first comment only demonstrates ignorance; the second, fails to understand that the soldiers of the Crusades actually believed that what they were fighting for had eternal consequences.

Today’s soldiers will grow weary fighting for freedom when, upon their return, find that their governments define freedom as confused young men’s rights to shower with their daughters after gym. The growth of government has been a solution to the wrong problem for decades, and when freedom is celebrated in the West, it is done so with the proper permissions, permits, and waivers.

The spiritual underpinnings of Western freedoms and democracies have not simply faded away, they have been banished. This is why in popular culture, the two options of humanistic education and health care (the 21st centuries’ version of salvation) or elimination through bombing are the only two choices available.

The option of national repentance, from leaders to the led, across all segments of society, is not on the table, and this is certainly why the West must fall.

We, the West, have tolerated the destruction of generations of children. We cannot, then, think of ourselves as the moral superiors to Islam in any form, violent or not. Our cultural sins have brought great judgement upon us, and God will give our lands to those who do not kill their children.

Consider God’s words against Nineveh, who a century and a half repented under Jonah’s preaching, but was to fall for their sins. Nahum compares Nineveh to Thebes of Egypt, a nation that Nineveh (Assyria) slaughterd:

Nahum 3:10 (ESV)

10  Yet she became an exile;

she went into captivity;

her infants were dashed in pieces

at the head of every street;

for her honoured men lots were cast,

and all her great men were bound in chains.

Notice the infanticide that Nineveh inflicted upon Thebes, and how that was a cause of judgement. Nineveh was known for its cruelty, yet somehow Western post-Christian nations think that they are not! The thousands that Islam has killed in the past decades is such a small number compared to the mass destruction of the innocent by the West.

In Nahum 3:11-13 we read how easy it will be for Babylon to defeat Nineveh. Keep in mind that Nineveh and Assyria were the regions superpowers at the time, and were thought for years to be invincible. No military strategist could have seen this coming.

11  You also will be drunken;

you will go into hiding;

you will seek a refuge from the enemy.

12  All your fortresses are like fig trees

with first-ripe figs—

if shaken they fall

into the mouth of the eater.

13  Behold, your troops

are women in your midst.

The gates of your land

are wide open to your enemies;

fire has devoured your bars.

Drunkenness, fear, pursuit, an easy target, women soldiers and open gates all describe Nineveh before her enemies. Nineveh, and her neighbhours, did not believe this for a moment, but this is how their end came.

God mocks their preparations, as He mocks our strategies today:

Nahum 3:14–15 (ESV)

14  Draw water for the siege;

strengthen your forts;

go into the clay;

tread the mortar;

take hold of the brick mold!

15  There will the fire devour you;

the sword will cut you off.

It will devour you like the locust.

Multiply yourselves like the locust;

multiply like the grasshopper!

Get ready, and die anyway, is the message of Nahum.

More doctors! More teachers! or, More bombs!

Since we’re not treating our cancer, it must metastasize. God granted Nineveh repentance during the days of Jonah, but did not do so again. We have no certainty that He will grant us repentance, and we should just reflect upon that.

Some Posts Are Too Important to Link–and Must be Quoted in Full

The link is here.

Having given that, Doug Wilson’s entire post is below:

7 Questions for Those Who Want Money for People With Minds That Hate . . .

Let me get this straight.

1. You are the group that wants drivers working for FedEx and UPS to be unknowingly carrying around boxes with baby parts in them, babies who were killed for the sake of those parts, AND you want to be the enlightened, progressive group?Boxes

2. You are the party that wants lab workers to dump baby parts into pie plates, in order to sort through them carefully looking for the valuable bits, AND you want to be the liberals?

3. You are the faction who wants to keep us from showing mothers an ultrasound of their child, in order to keep that child alive, and you want to prevent those same mothers from seeing how you use the ultrasound (to avoid damaging the product), AND you want to be known as the ones in favor of the free flow of information?

4. You want to tell one group of people that we are just dealing with nondescript tissue and such, and you want to tell another group that you have livers, hearts, lungs, and limbs for sale, AND you want to be the party of intellectual consistency and forthrightness?

5. You want to be known as the group that thinks #blacklivesmatter, while you are the leading wholesaler of black people in America today, only you kill them first, with your prices much lower than 19th century prices were, AND you want to be the enlightened ones who are showing the way for us on matters of racial reconciliation?

6. You are the party of women’s rights and you agitate for protection for women, and yet with the exclamation #anotherboy, you reveal that you do in fact know that half of the bodies you are taking to market are female bodies, AND you want to be the feminists?

7. You are the group that has T-shirts reading “care no matter what,” and at the same time you are the merchants who fatten children for market, since 20 weekers bringing in more than the younger ones, AND you don’t want to be the witches straight out of medieval tales?

All I can tell is brother you have to wait.

Oppression’s Request: Keep Your Faith to Yourself

Wilberforce quote

WILBERFORCE, WILLIAM (1759–1833)
English philanthropist; antislavery crusader

Born in Hull, Wilberforce studied in desultory fashion at Cambridge, then in 1780 entered Parliament and became a strong supporter of William Pitt, who persuaded Wilberforce to devote himself to the abolition of the slave trade. In this cause he opposed many in the empire who had powerful vested interests, and he opposed those who regarded slavery as “a natural and scriptural institution.” The reformers finally triumphed in 1807 when the slave trade was done away with, though abolition of slavery itself had to wait until 1833.
Wilberforce, who had been converted at twenty-five, was the most famous figure associated with the Clapham Sect, which sought to do for the upper classes what Wesley had done for the lower. They used their wealth and influence in Christian outreach. He supported missions, fought to improve the condition of the poor and prisoners, and in 1804 helped to form the British and Foreign Bible Society. He also supported Catholic emancipation. Wilberforce, who was once described as “the authorized interpreter of the national conscience,” published in 1797 his Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System, which ran through many editions.

J.D.DOUGLAS
J.D. Douglas, “Wilberforce, William,” ed. J.D. Douglas and Philip W. Comfort, Who’s Who in Christian History (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1992), 719.